The opening volume of an extremely classic-feeling fantasy adventure
Killian is the captain of the Cutlass Hawk, a ship he may or may not have acquired entirely legally, in debt to local crime bosses, and haunted by the his past, both the crimes he's committed and the events that led him to them in the first place. He's charming, violent, clever, impulsive, and has a little bit of access to the skein, the magic of his world. Trying to pay off his debt to some local crime bosses, he's now been shackled with an entirely dubious duo from the culture who killed his mother, and who want to undertake one of the most dangerous sea voyages possible, through the domain of a mad god sea serpent with a penchant for storms and shipwrecking.
If The Deep and the Drowned sounds, from this brief synopsis, like the sort of fantasy story you've read before... well, you'd be right. There is something incredibly old school about it, an familiar too. Its expansive secondary world, its magic that underlies reality, its gods run wild and faded ruins of a once-great civilisation, its hero with a messy past and a yearning for revenge, even its pacing and twist reveals, all of it feels straight out of all the books I devoured as a teenager a couple of decades ago. And straight out of the type of books I haven't read in the last decade at the very least. This is a type of fantasy that just isn't hitting big, and I'm not picking up, these days, and so it was with a strange sense of déjà vu that I ploughed through Ian Green's forthcoming novel.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm honestly not sure.
In the abstract, I absolutely do not think stories need to be timebound to the trends of the moment: there will always be someone who doesn't like the flavour of the month and yearns for what came before, and they deserve books to read just as much as anyone else does. But... but. The problem with writing something that feels quite so familiar as this does, quite so keenly evokes a mode of fantasy I read so very much of as a teenager, is that it feels like the reiteration of the same mode needs to justify itself. When so much of a thing already exists, there's a sense that the new one has to make a statement about what it brings to the party that the pre-existing novels filling the same niche don't provide. That argument can take many forms, and "it's not new but it's phenomenally well-written" could be one of them. It doesn't have to be a twist (though twists, reworkings and reimaginations of the existing corpus are great fun and make their arguments quite plainly enough). But if there's already a plentiful crop of this one type of thing, the work has a lot of crowd to stand out from. I'm not sure "there's not been any new iterations of this one thing" for a while is quite enough, but maybe that's just me.
In any case, and sadly, I'm not sure The Deep and the Drowned succeeds in making such a case. Which isn't to say it's a bad book - the worldbuilding, plotting, prose and characterisation are all competently done, and while there are things to poke at in some of them (more on which shortly), that's true of many books still well worth reading. But when I put it down, I felt a great sense of it missing something. And I think it comes in at the level of theme, or possibly argument; I'm not sure if the book has something to say beyond having a cool story... and I think it might have needed one.
It's interesting to compare to Green's previous novel, Extremophile, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award last year. It was a novel of a type I'm not normally excited by (heists) but which managed to lure me into a heap of enjoyment through a mixture of good writing, the sense of a depth of knowledge on the author's part across several of its topics/settings, and just a strong thread, right at the base, of having something the say. It's a novel I ended up really liking, almost in spite of myself, just out of how well it was put together, at every level.
A lot of that same competence is here too, although translated away from near future climate fiction and into a secondary world. The handwriting of the same creator is visible, so to speak, just in a different font. But without the driving force of Extremophile's anger, or something equally forceful, it's not got quite the same magic to it that made the previous novel sing.
Which sounds like a lot of a downer on the novel, but it's not all that way. Some of the disappointment comes precisely because so many aspects of it are handled with the same skilled hand, that the little hole in the centre is felt that much more keenly. The possibility is visible.
One of the great decisions Green has made is to have his protagonist (and his ship full of crew and associates) be genuinely somewhat criminal. It's an unfortunately common issue in stories containing pirates, thieves and other lawbreakers that they don't... actually do any pirating or lawbreaking. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty is the easiest example that jumps to mind, but is hardly alone in this. Pirates are, to be quite frank, not very nice. They do not very nice things, often to entirely innocent people who just happen to be in possession of cargo. Or people who aren't totally innocent but still don't necessarily deserve to be pirated. If you're going to do a story with pirates in, you should probably accept that they are pirates and embrace it, moral mess and all. And if you can't swallow that... maybe don't write about pirates. Green has not fallen into this trap. His protagonist, Killian, gives plenty of examples of things he's done in his life which are... let's say not great. Certainly not lawful. Quite often not all that moral. But he remains a sympathetic character nonetheless, because people can be complex things. He has a backstory, he has context, that make his crimes make sense, but without feeling the need to constantly excuse and minimise them. It's great, and it gives the story and setting more weight for its premises to be taken seriously in this way.
There's also a sense of stories beyond the one being told, which to my mind is the mark of worldbuilding done right. This especially comes through from several of the secondary characters, with whom there are moments of understanding of their place, and their trajectory, through the world that only intersects with Killian's, rather than being subordinate to it. Whether that's the antagonists Marion and Mournchild, part of two different, temporarily aligned hierarchies, with their own goals and mores, or Silver, who disapproves of some of the plundering but needs Killian for his access to archaeological sites she has an interest in, or Kaikatsu, a member of another species called the Antian, who carries a mysterious creature called a relu in secret, and clearly has goals relating to it that have driven her far from her people. It is, in focus, Killian's story, but Green does enough work on these other threads to make them feel just real enough, just deep enough, to imply the world beyond the borders of the narrative.
It's also a book full of religion. In some ways, religion done much better than in a lot of traditional fantasy: the ones shown on page for any real time definitely give the feel of being institutions that people might actually be part of, which is rarer than it should be. These are religions that make sense as a part of daily life, with rituals and restrictions and hierarchies and internal politics, all hinted at and gestured to, if not explored in detail. It's not the superficial thing of "what if gods, but real", though there are gods walking (and swimming) about in Green's archipelago. Thought has been given to how the metaphysical shapes the societal, and that is so critical to making this kind of worldbuilding work. Religion is never quite enough in the focus to get some moments of real heft, but as a part of the construction in the background, it's pretty well done.
On a plot and pacing level, if we step aside a little from the familiarity problem, there's a lot of skill too. Without going into detail on the specifics, there's a late third act twist which, if you've read a lot of this sort of fantasy is entirely to be expected. But the way Green plots the course towards it, however visible on the horizon, is extremely competent: there's a reveal to the reader just the right amount of time before the reveal to the protagonist, and the gap between them is just right to enjoy the knowledge without getting impatient for the fallout.
But then again, there are some issues in execution too. These predominantly lie in the character of Killian, the hero. Making him have his thirst for blood and vengeance is great, he feels like a genuinely criminal criminal in the grubby mess of the world that it makes sense he'd inhabit. But, at times, he's also... a big softie. And having that genuine criminality puts these two parts of his character at further apart poles. By the end of the novel, I felt there needed to be more work to sell him uniting those contrasts for him to truly make sense to me reading him; the regret he feels for some of his bloody deeds isn't quite enough to make the link work. Likewise, he's clearly meant to be charming, impulsive but persuasive, but I'm not quite sure the writing sells that enough for me to believe in it, especially in his dialogue. He ends up being the thing he needs to be for the story at all points, and doesn't quite succeed in being a character, or not always.
And so, the world is interesting, the writing pretty good, and there's promise for a lot of intersecting lines of adventure in the future installments in what is clearly going to be a series. If you want the sort of secondary world fantasy that was going round in heaps 15-20 years ago, this is doing exactly that, and pretty well. But it's not doing a whole lot more, and after the promise of Extremophile I was hoping for something with a bit more bite to it.
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The Math
Highlights: fantasy religions that feel like people engage with them; a big, broad world; pirates who actually do crimes
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10
Reference: Ian Green, The Deep and the Drowned, [Head of Zeus, 2026].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
